Military

When Michael Schneider’s anxiety and PTSD flare up, he reaches for the ukulele he keeps next to his computer.

“I can’t actually play a song,” says Schneider, who suffered two serious brain injuries during nearly 22 years in the Marines. “But I can play chords to take my stress level down.”

It’s a technique Schneider learned through Creative Forces, an arts therapy initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

It’s also an example of how arts therapies are increasingly being used to treat brain conditions including PTSD, depression, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

But most of these treatments, ranging from music to poetry to visual arts, still have not undergone rigorous scientific testing. So artists and brain scientists have launched an initiative called the NeuroArts Blueprint to change that.

The initiative is the result of a partnership between the Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics and the Aspen Institute’s Health, Medicine and Society Program. Its leadership includes soprano Renée Fleming, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and Dr. Eric Nestler, who directs the Friedman Brain Institute at Mt. Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine.

One goal of the NeuroArts initiative is to measure how arts therapies change the brains of people like Schneider.

“I had a traumatic brain injury when I was involved in a helicopter incident on board a U.S. Naval vessel,” he explains. That was in 2005.

Later that same year, he experienced sudden decompression — the aviator’s version of the bends — while training for high-altitude flights. The result was like a stroke.

“On my right side of my body I lost all feeling,” he says.

Schneider recovered from both incidents. But they took a toll on his brain. And in 2014, he began having serious problems.

“I had this progression of really bad seizures,” he says. “At one point I was having 20 to 40 seizures a day.”

He also developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, known as PTSD, and depression. Schneider went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda for treatment. But he wasn’t getting better.

“I’d lost hope,” he says. “I didn’t really believe that I was going to make it through the next couple of years. My brain was just shutting down.”

That’s when military doctors referred Schneider to Rebecca Vaudreuil, a music therapist at Creative Forces and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. Early on, Vaudreuil learned something intriguing about the big Marine from Marquette, Michigan.

“He had a history in doing theater arts,” she says. “And so I could tell, you know, there was some priming there.”

Vaudreuil had Schneider play a few notes on a piano.

“I started to hum the notes and she’s like, ‘You can sing,'” he recalls.

So they sang Andrea Bocelli’s operatic hit Con Te Partirò.

That led to a lot of musical exploration, including the ukulele. It also helped Schneider start talking about his struggles and gave him a way to reduce his seizures and relieve some of his anxiety and PTSD.

“Relearning music took away that fight-or-flight, that ingrained piece of how I trained,” he says. “It was able to open up all these new pathways through my brain.”

Personal experiences like Schneider’s are beginning to get some scientific confirmation, Vaudreuil says.

“We know that when we receive music, even when we hear music, we’re activating multiple parts of the brain,” she says. And studies suggest that this strengthens brain circuits that help repair damage.

There are also hints that the brain changes in response to other art therapies, like dance, poetry, painting, sculpture, even leatherwork. But so far, there hasn’t been much scientific study to back that up.

“We’re going to need to provide the robust, empirical data demonstrating that there is efficacy,” says Nestler, a co-chair of the NeuroArts initiative advisory board.

“It’s harder in some ways to do that with music or art than with a new medication,” he says. “On the other hand, I think it’s very doable.”

Nestler says advances in brain imaging technology are making it possible to objectively measure brain changes produced by arts therapies.

For example, there are lots of anecdotal reports of Alzheimer’s patients who can no longer speak, but will begin singing and become more interactive when they hear a familiar song.

“Now, in addition to reporting the behavioral changes, one could identify a greater level of activity in circuits in the brain related to memory and emotions,” Nestler says.

Fleming, another co-chair of the advisory board, has actually seen the effect of singing on her own brain.

During a visit to the National Institutes of Health in 2017, she agreed to perform while inside an MRI scanner.

“They had me singing, imagining singing and speaking,” she says. “They would probably have guessed that singing would have the largest effect on my brain, but it didn’t. It was imagining singing.”

For Fleming, the existence of something like the NeuroArts Blueprint represents a big and important shift in thinking since the early days of her career.

“I had terrible stage fright. I had somatic pain from performance pressure,” she says. But at the time, doctors tended to dismiss symptoms involving the link between mind and body.

So now Fleming makes a point of using her performance trips to meet with brain scientists and arts therapists.

“I saw a music therapist working with a gentleman who’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak,” she says. “And within one session of singing he could communicate.”

In order to understand why that happened, she says, neuroscientists and artists need to create a new field of expertise: neuroarts.

Nestler, the neuroscientist, agrees.

“We’ve realized how our two worlds can merge in this really interesting way,” he says.

But Nestler says even with good scientific evidence, arts therapies are likely to face obstacles to gaining widespread acceptance and support.

“No one asks a question about paying $100,000 or more for spinal surgery,” he says. But coverage of music therapy for a brain condition, he says, “that is going to be a major struggle.”

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The nation’s sole heavy icebreaker arrived in Antarctica on Monday after a nearly three-month trip from Seattle.

The deployment marks the Polar Star’s 25th journey to the earth’s southernmost continent, supporting Operation Deep Freeze, an annual mission to resupply American scientists doing research near the South Pole, according to a Coast Guard statement.

Each year, the crew maneuvers the nearly 400-foot, 13,000-ton icebreaker to cut a channel to McMurdo Station, the U.S. Antarctic Program’s logistics hub. It carves through miles of ice, sometimes up to 21-feet thick.

This winter, the icebreaker’s 157 crew members spent four weeks breaking ice and grooming the shipping channel to the station, which was established on Ross Island in 1955.

The cleared route will enable two supply vessels to safely offload more than 8 million gallons of fuel and a thousand cargo containers. Together, the two ships carry enough fuel, food and critical supplies to sustain research operations throughout the year. Supply ships will return again during the next austral summer — the season in the Southern Hemisphere that runs from about November to February.

The mission marks the Polar Star’s first return to Antarctica since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Coast Guard statement.

Last winter, instead of going south, the 46-year-old icebreaker conducted an Arctic deployment, and stopped in the Port of Dutch Harbor for the first time since 2013.

It was the ship’s first winter Arctic deployment in nearly four decades.

The Polar Star patrolled Alaska’s Arctic waters, including the maritime boundary line separating the U.S. and Russia, to assert maritime sovereignty and security in the far north and train the next generation of polar sailors.

Last winter’s patrol was the farthest north any American ship has sailed in the winter months.

The Coast Guard has been the sole provider of the nation’s polar icebreaking capability since 1965, according to the statement. Commissioned in 1976, the Polar Star is the United States’ only heavy icebreaker. The Coast Guard is increasing its icebreaking fleet with construction of three new polar security cutters “to ensure persistent national presence and reliable access to the polar regions.”

The construction on the first new icebreaker is expected to be completed in 2024.

The Air Force has developed a new device to help fighter pilots urinate during long flights. It’s a challenge that pilots stationed overseas often face, because they routinely fly missions to faraway destinations. That’s why an Eielson Air Force Base pilot helped test the new in-flight bladder relief system — one that’s designed for women.

It’s one of the most basic human functions. But if you’re a fighter pilot strapped into a cramped cockpit flying at 500 knots and headed into a faraway combat zone, the need to pee can become a major concern.

“It might sound like a weird thing to talk about, but … if you’re so focused on that instead of flying the aircraft, it could be a real hindrance,” says Maj. Nikki Yogi, an F-35 pilot stationed at Eielson Air Force Base.

Yogi knows all about that. Five years ago, when she was a captain flying A-10s, she had a bad experience with an older in-flight bladder relief system that she says was issued a week before deploying overseas. She was able to make it work, with the help of another woman fighter pilot who recognized that the kit was missing some parts.

But still, she says, “It did not go very well.”

Yogi said in a recent interview that she had problems with the device in part because the Air Force has only just begun modifying bladder relief devices that until then had been used almost exclusively by men. She says that’s because until the 1990s, only men were allowed to fly combat missions.

Yogi said the first women fighter pilots didn’t want to complain so they wouldn’t be accused of not being tough enough for the job.

“When women first started flying fighters back in the early ’90s,” she said, “it was such a new concept, and there was a lot of eyes on them, and they were just kind of trying as hard as they could for people not to look at them.”

Yogi says that’s why she didn’t say anything about the problems she had with the device. And so she resumed what she had been doing to avoid having to urinate in-flight: She stopped drinking fluids a few hours before flying. But that caused other problems, especially on one particular mission.

“I was dehydrating myself to the point where I was throwing up in the jet, and had to come back early,” she said. “And so I was not ready to take the fight where it needed to be, and what I was tasked to do.”

So-called “tactical dehydration” is common among pilots who can’t use bladder relief devices. But it can reduce combat performance and endurance and tolerance for G-forces. And it also can lead to kidney stones and urinary-tract infections, says Scott Cota, an aircrew flight-equipment expert with the Air Force’s Air Combat Command at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia.

“So it’s important for us to try to work on these devices so that we can reduce the long-term health effects associated with tactical dehydration,” he said in a recent interview.

“This is really about the health and safety of the aircrew, so they can focus on the thing they need to focus on — which is the mission,” he said.

Yogi came to the same conclusion. And with the encouragement of her commander and a realization by senior leadership on the growing need to accommodate women in the service, she and other female pilots, along with a group of both men and women pilots, did some research on bladder relief systems.

“And some of this comes down to – this bladder relief stuff, like it’s not within anyone’s job title to be caring about this stuff,” she said.

After months of testing with Cota’s team and Vermont-based Omni Defense Technologies, the contractor the Air Force hired to upgrade the devices, the pilots recommended a version called the Gen. 3 Skydrate.

Yogi says they the Air Force and Omni’s testing staff really appreciated her real-world experience with older devices. And, she says, “I was really grateful to be able to provide them feedback on the system and then be able to hear about and see some of the new improvements for Skydrate.”

Those improvements apparently impressed Air Force officials. The service got its first shipment of the Skydrate in December, and Cota said they’ve ordered the first batch of 250 that’ll be delivered over the next few months to Air Force bases around the country and overseas – including Eielson.

Yogi says she’s looking forward to using the improved device for her next flight to military training exercises around Guam – a flight that takes about 10 hours.

The U.S. Navy says its warships will need more room to maneuver during next year’s military exercises in the Gulf of Alaska. It’s going through the permitting process and accepting public comment on the proposal next month.

The Navy conducts live-fire exercises in federal waters east of Kodiak Island and south of Prince William Sound as part of the military’s Northern Edge training exercises.

John Mosher, a civilian environmental planner for the U.S. Navy, says military leadership has decided the current 55,000-square-mile area is too tight for maneuvers by its half-dozen warships

“The area that we were kind of restricted to operate in was just too limited,” he told CoastAlaska on Tuesday. “It wasn’t a realistic way of maneuvering our vessels and our aircraft as they would in a real world scenario.”

The Navy is proposing to add a 246,000-square-mile zone that would extend westward as far as Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. It would be used for transiting and not for live-fire drills or active sonar usage, both of which would only be conducted in the existing area.

The drills have been criticized in the past by some who object to its scale, timing and location due to its proximity to fishing grounds and sensitive habitat.

But Mosher says past exercises haven’t created any problems for fishing boats or civilian shipping in the area.

“Our vessels typically operate further away from the main channels, the main fishing grounds, things like that,” he said.

The Navy also says it won’t detonate explosives in waters that are less than 4,000 meters (13,120 ft.) deep. Mosher says that pledge is in response to comments from Alaska Native tribes and the commercial fishing industry.

“It eliminates the potential for effects on fish, on marine mammals, on marine birds and then also minimizes the potential to overlap with fishing activities,” he said.

Northern Edge is a biennial training exercise conducted in and around Alaska. It’s headed-up by the Air Force and involves service members from every branch of the military. It was last held in June 2021 and included an aircraft carrier.

The precise dates of the 2023 exercises haven’t been announced. In the past, military vessels have broadcast on automatic identification systems transponders. Mosher says whether that would happen next year is up to military planners.

A 45-day comment period will collect comments on the Navy’s proposal to expand its area of maneuvers during 2023’s Northern Edge exercises.

The Navy announced Tuesday on its Gulf of Alaska website that it’s seeking to amend its existing environmental impact statement for the proposal. A formal decision is expected in the fall, the Navy says.

Chris Woodley of the Groundfish Forum, which represents trawlers in the Gulf of Alaska, said several commercial fishing groups are just now reviewing the Navy’s plans and didn’t have any immediate comment.

Eight decades after the fact, the federal government plans to spend $2.2 million to clean up a contaminated former army site on Kruzof Island near Sitka. It isn’t going to happen overnight — the Army Corps is still designing the effort. Actual work and removal of the PCB-contaminated soils isn’t expected until 2024.

But to understand how and why Fort Babcock came to be requires a 20th Century history lesson on the rise of Imperial Japan as a Pacific power. And few people in Sitka know as much about the area’s military history as high school teacher Matt Hunter.

As an amateur historian, Hunter curates a website on Sitka Harbor’s WWII-era military sites. He says that when Japan invaded its neighbors in the 1930s, the United States realized it had few Pacific defenses outside of Hawaii and the Panama Canal zone.

“But Alaska, sort of the third vertex of a strategic triangle, was completely undefended,” he said.

A critical part of Sitka Sound’s defenses

Fort Babcock was designed to be a keystone in the defense of Sitka Harbor, which during World War II hosted a significant military presence to counter the threat from Imperial Japan.

But today its legacy today is little more than abandoned buildings and contaminated soil near the shores of Sitka Sound.

Naval air stations were established on Kodiak Island, Dutch Harbor and Sitka. Defense of those naval bases fell to the U.S. Army which installed a battery of six-inch guns capable of striking an enemy ship from 12 miles away.

But as the tide of the war shifted, the threat from Imperial Japan receded, and by 1944 the military canceled the defense project.

“And then as soon as they finished, they abandoned them and locked the doors and left,” Hunter said.

Today the site is heavily overgrown. But among the ruins there’s still evidence of the efforts of thousands of men.

“There’s even some notes on some of the work benches, and they’re written by the men who are in the construction battalion,” he said.

A nonagenarian veteran returns in 2010

One member of that battalion came back for a visit more than a decade ago.

“I’m just like MacArthur wading ashore,” 93-year-old Bob Vollmer laughingly told KCAW during a visit to Kruzof Island in 2010. “MacArthur said, ‘I shall return!’”

“I didn’t like that guy, though,” he added.

KCAW’s Ed Ronco shadowed Vollmer and filed a story for the Alaska Public Radio Network about the Indiana man, who’d spent most of 1943 helping build Fort Babcock.

Vollmer passed away earlier this month at the age of 104. But in an interview with KCAW some 11 years back, he expressed surprise by how much nature had taken over what had been a bustling observation post during the war.

“I’m real happy to know, like places like this, they are still environmentally sound,” he said as he took in the thick foliage that had reclaimed the former fort site.

But Fort Babcock is not as pristine as it may have appeared to Vollmer in 2010. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is tasked with cleaning up the hundreds of potentially contaminated former military sites in Alaska, discovered serious contamination several years later.

Beth Astley is the Army Corps’ project manager overseeing cleanup of the site. She says investigators knew about the old oil tanks. But in 2012 and 2013 they dug deeper.

“That’s when we discovered that there was PCB contamination at the former power plant,” she told CoastAlaska in a recent interview.

In a 259-page decision document filed last August, the Army Corps announced plans to remove about 559 cubic yards of PCB-contaminated soil and place them in what Astley calls “super sacks.”

“Which are large sacks that are specially made to hold contaminated soil. And then those bags would then be put on to a barge and then they would be taken to a port and then to the landfill (in the Lower 48),” she said.

PCBs are highly toxic and carcinogenic and can build up in the human body over years.

“They don’t seem to go away very quickly,” Astley said. “They can persist for a really long time.”

Sitka tribal officials assess cleanup plan

Sitka Tribe of Alaska has been pushing for the cleanup of Shoals Point. People hunt, fish and gather traditional foods on Kruzof Island, just a 10-mile skiff ride across the sound from Sitka.

“The Tribe is pleased that … the Army Corps is going forward with cleaning up the site, because it’s long overdue,” said Helen Dangel, a biologist who works as a natural resources specialist for the Sitka tribe.

Dangel says the Army Corps’ priority seems to be the most hazardous waste at the former Fort Babcock site.

“But that doesn’t mean that all of the contaminants will be cleaned up,” she said. “In the document, there’s a lot of talk about cleanup levels, and if there’s a complete pathway to humans, through air through, through drinking water, through skin contact, or through eating. And so if they determine that there’s not a complete pathway, then some of the contaminants aren’t getting cleaned up.”

The Army Corps says it plans to remediate the area to residential standards and that no additional environmental monitoring would be required.

Matt Hunter, the math and physics teacher at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, says Shoals Point is a fantastic place to visit — especially for anyone interested in Alaska’s early 20th century history when Sitka was a hive of military activity on what’s now an uninhabited island.

“It’s not like a park or something that’s had interpretation and doors locked. Everything’s wide open,” Hunter said. “And it’s also a very unique place. Being on this volcanic island with all the surf coming in, and the open ocean is absolutely beautiful.”

Alaska has gained residents — albeit slightly — for the first time in four years, according to population estimates released by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. From April 2020 to July 2021, Alaska’s population increased by 932 people.

“It was just  0.1 percent,” said David Howell, the state demographer. “But still, it broke our trend of population losses that we’ve been seeing.”

Howell said much of the growth is due to an influx of military personnel, particularly at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks. Interstate migration is also down, meaning fewer people moved out of the state. That’s a nationwide trend as more people stayed put during the pandemic.

Still, despite the overall statewide gain, it might seem like there are fewer people in most communities. That’s because 21 of Alaska’s 30 boroughs saw declines in their populations over the same time period.

Anchorage’s population declined by about 0.5% or 1,550 people. Juneau’s population declined by 0.25% or 100 people. In Kodiak, there was just over a 1% dip in residents. Howell said that’s partially because of the Coast Guard base.

“We survey the military bases around the state and our numbers were really just down from the census, so that was what was going on there,” he said. “There wasn’t really any dramatic change in the Kodiak Borough, just with the Coast Guard numbers being a little bit down.”

Fairbanks grew the most, gaining 1,860 people, or about 1.5%, followed by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough with 1,724 more people, about 1.3%.

An uptick in the number of deaths across the state was particularly striking, according to Howell. COVID-19 deaths added to the numbers, but Howell said that’s not the whole story.

“There were 380 COVID deaths but we saw this 760 jump in deaths, so it’s not the only thing occurring,” said Howell. “Of course, it could be delayed medical treatment that sort of thing, I mean, there’s lots of possible reasons. We just don’t have the data to flush out at this point.”

Nationally, doctors and public health experts have expressed concern that some people included in excess death figures did die of COVD-19 but aren’t counted as COVID-19 deaths because they were not tested or diagnosed with it.

The population information from the state is an estimate and not a formal count like the 2020 Census.